Alan Gillespie is a Quaternary geologist and
directs the Remote
Sensing Laboratory.His research
interests are in glacial geology, geochronology, and landscape
evolution, on
Earth and Mars.His interest in remote
sensing is in both its theory and application to these problems.
Gillespie is
currently funded by NASA and the Department of Energy.

Gillespie has been investigating
asynchrony in glacier
advances across Central Asia since
1991,
research that led to the recognition that this area consists of three
or more
climatic regions.The last maximum
advances in the Kyrgyz Tien Shan and farther east in the same range
differed by
tens of thousands of years.This
intricate granularity is not yet explained fully.Gillespie
is
also
investigating
the
origin of
the giant canyons of the Valles Marineris system on Mars, working with
John
Adams, Dave Montgomery and others to suggest that geothermal dewatering
of
hydrous salts distributed throughout the 10-km-deep regolith of the
Martian
highlands resulted in the removal of material through faults and
aquifers on a
gigantic scale.The canyons are,
essentially, collapse features in a salt karst terrain.

Gillespie is also
working on hyperspectral thermal infrared
remote sensing, using thermal radiation emitted from the land surface
to
determine mineral composition. He has
served as the Chair or Co-Chair for 16 graduate students, and served on
the
thesis committee for 33 others. He has
authored or co-authored 4 books and 185 articles (59 as 1st
author). Since 2000 he has been Sr.
Editor for the journal Quaternary
Research.

Selected
Publications:

Gillespie, A. R., and
Soha,
J. M., 1972. An orthographic photomap of
the south pole of Mars from Mariner 6 and 7. Icarus 16, 522-527.